Simply washed out by a woman : social control, status and discrimination in a statutory authority
Date
1988
Authors
Troy, Patrick
Lloyd, Clem J.
Journal Title
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Volume Title
Publisher
Urban Research Program. Research School of Social Science. Australian National University.
Abstract
This paper is part of a continuing program of work by the authors on the administrative history and practices of the Hunter District Water Board which is
one of the principal statutory authorities in New South Wales. The program has
been generously assisted by the Board. The centre piece of this series is a
comprehensive administrative history of the Board since its establishment in
1892, scheduled for publication in 1989. An associated series of papers will
cover a range of issues related to this core study. This paper deals with
questions of discrimination in the organisation and administration of the Board.
Companion papers will cover the statutory basis of the Board, its internal work
practices and rituals, the Board's relationship with trade unions, its pricing
policies, and its attitudes to major industrial customers such as BHP.
'Simply Washed Out by a Woman' analyses questions of social control, status
and discrimination in the day-to-day administration of the Board. It concludes
that the most common forms of discrimination have been directed to religion,
politics and gender. After briefly considering the limited evidence of religious
and political discrimination, the bulk of the paper examines historical evidence
of gender discrimination. It looks at occupational discrimination directed
against women; discrimination in comparative career structures between men
and women; discriminatory practices levelled at married women;
discrimination in the incidence of career-related benefits such as
superannuation; dress constraints imposed on both women and men; the used of
nomenclature which applies a discrimination against women and men;
idiosyncratic working practices designed to imply an inferior status for women
employees; gender discrimination based on pay differentials; and
discriminatory allocation of high-status jobs between men and women.
The paper concludes that the Board's attitude to its female employees has been
generally conservative until recent years. A supplementary conclusion is that
the Board's Salaried Officers' Association, which covers all salaried workers
for the Board, in earlier years favoured the interests of its male members to the
detriment of women. In total, the paper suggests that the Board's administrative
practice has shown discrimination against women until relatively recent years
when genuine efforts have been made to redress a traditional imbalance and
eliminate discriminatory practice.
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Type
Working/Technical Paper
Book Title
Administrative history and practices of the Hunter District Water Board
Entity type
Access Statement
Open Access
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU)
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